Memories of the klez revival and"The Klezmorim"

Over the last few months former members of "The Klezmorim," (the band I feel is responsible for the klezmer revival) Lev Liberman and David Julian Gray , have been sending me e-mail about the band. I was never a big fan of their recordings, but I never voluntarily missed one of their concerts once I first heard them on KPFA, from Berkeley, at a fundraiser in 1982. (They had just released their album, "Metropolis,"--"Once you've heard Metropolis," one bandmember proclaimed, "you'll never need to listen to music ... again!") Since I haven't yet made time to talk about their recordings, and since their performances brought me much pleasure over the years, and since they are good storytellers, I thought I'd compile a few paragraphs from the e-mail and let this suffice until Lev or someone writes the definitive article on the band. [ari]

Lev introduces himself

Ari, thanks for your admirable effort to organize the world of klezmer
online. Wanna put me in the klezmer contact database? I co-founded
(with David Skuse) The Klezmorim in Berkeley, California, in 1975 --
arranging, recording, & playing sax with the band across North America &
Europe until 1988. I'm now a writer & multimedia developer in Portland,
Oregon. The burgeoning of the klezmer scene is gratifying: it's
particularly nice to see serious jazz musician/composers taking the
genre in risky new directions. I have no idea how posterity views The
Klezmorim, but I'd like to think that the current klezmer revival had
its origins in our early experiments with tight ensemble playing,
improvisation, klezmer/jazz fusions, neo-klezmer composition, street
music, world beat, and New Vaudeville. (Not to mention our klezmer
workshops and college arts residencies, and our carefully crafted public
personae of arrogant popstardom & sophisticated sleaze.).... [lev, 11/30/95]

On the origins of the band's name

In response to my hope of going to work in Sarajevo next year, something that is now pretty much on hold: "Here's a bit a Klez revival trivia: The original name of the group which
became the Klezmorim (L. Liberman, D. Skuse, D. Gray, L. Chastain, & G.
Carageorge) was "the Sarejevo Folk Ensemble" -- this aggregation changed its
name to "The Klezmorim" in late Jan. of '76 dedicated to old time Yiddish
dance band music (which was not yet called "klezmer music" by anyone) and
played its first gig as such at the North Berkeley branch of the Berkeley
Public Library April 13, 1976. [djg, 2/11/96]

To amplify a bit:

The Berkeley Library gig was kind of special, marking the first time we took
an all-klezmer/Yiddish repertoire out to a general audience. I seem to
remember that we played the next day at the Downtown Berkeley branch, too.
Supposedly there's a videotape, but I've never seen it & by now it's
probably with Elvis in the Lost Ark.

The band had in fact been quite active (hyperactive) prior to that, in late
'75, playing at parties & weddings & busking on streetcorners in the San
Francisco Bay Area. David Gray (the short blond David) doesn't remember all
those gigs 'cause he was convalescing from mononucleosis or leprosy or
something at the time. David Skuse (the tall dark David) also missed some
gigs 'cause he left for a month to play on a cruise ship. For many of those
first gigs we were really two half-a-bands, with me as the connecting link.

Think "The Sarajevo Folk Ensemble" is a pretentious name for a five-piece
string band? It's a wild name for a folk duo. In '74, Skuse & I were
playing at parties & restaurants -- calling ourselves, duh, "Lev & Dave."
(Before that, we were in a trio called "The Moscow Knights.") So one day I
had an epiphany (a kind of French pastry they serve in Berkeley) & concocted
for the pair of us a moniker loaded with epic grandeur & swashbuckling
romance: The Sarajevo Folk Ensemble. What was I thinking? Hey, I make no
claim to sanity.

But you shoulda seen the faces of the people who thought they were booking
some 48-piece People's National State Folkloric outfit from Sol Hurok -- and
in walks a flutist & a cat with a fiddle. I still crack up thinking about it... [lev, 5/14/96]

Boidt'yaa

In response to linking to the interview with Kevin Linscott: "For the record:
The musical ornament Kevin mentions should be spelled 'boidt'yaa.' This
orthography is from the horse's mouth; I coined the word in 1976. When I go
to that big klezmer jam in Hades, you can engrave on my tombstone: HE
DISCOVERED THE BOIDT'YAA. Make sure you spell it right!

"(I have no idea what the old-time klezmers called it. Maybe they had no
name for it, like a fish has no name for water.)" [lev, 2/27/96]

Quibbles about schtick and band history

Not that I wanna quibble, but I think that maybe the site kinda short-sheets
The Klezmorim. If I may comment on your blurb:

The Klezmorim were the band that got the klez revival of the Seventies
going. (It's not clear to me whether they preceded Kapelye or vice versa,
but =I= was certainly aware of the Klezmorim long before I heard of other
bands. ari).

The Klezmorim preceded Kapelye by about 3 years. We were already touring
nationally (& dropping in on Sapoznik in NY) before Kapelye was formed. To
my knowledge, the only other klezmer musicians performing publicly in
1975/76 (when we started) were Andy Statman & Zev Feldman, 3000 miles away.
Whether we preceded them by a few months, or they preceded us, I don't know.
But they were a duo, so we lay claim to being the first klezmer revival band.

In their later years, the band seemed more focused on shtick and on '20s jazz

Shtick & jazz, yes. Focus, no. By the time I left in 1988, we'd been
developing as artists for a couple of years in two very different directions:

Original tunes by me & Ben Goldberg -- with improvisations by the rest
of the band -- showcasing a fusion of klezmer, bebop, New Orleans,
minimalist, & cartoon soundtrack styles;

a very authentic 1910 Russian klezmer village street-band sound.
Both directions were important to us, and I think we benefited artistically
from the dynamic tension between traditionalism & free expression. We
performed a lot of this stuff at European jazz festivals & TV & radio, but
unfortunately never got around to issuing it on an album.

When we played '20s jazz, we tried to choose tunes which displayed klezmer
influences. Or else we played mainstream jazz tunes as they had been (or
might have been) played by klezmer musicians in the 1920s. We hoped to
demonstrate that klezmer musicians of old plied their craft not exclusively
in a "Jewish" milieu, but as professionals in the context of the larger
world & major musical influences of their day -- and that they had left
their stylistic imprint on various urban or commercial musics, e.g., jazz &
Hollywood. This notion, commonplace now, was treated as shocking heresy
when we first advanced it in the late '70s.

As to the shtick: guilty as charged. Two members who joined in 1977 -- Rick
Elmore and Brian Wishnefsky -- were veterans of the San Francisco street
scene, performing as (respectively) Professor Gizmo the One-Man Band and
Hairy James the Trumpet-Playing Gorilla. And in 1983/4 we joined forces
with the Flying Karamazov Brothers for a theatrical run as a sort of
juggling/brass supergroup. These guys' bizarre humor left its mark on us
permanently. We loved performing in fezzes and tossing rubber chickens into
the crowd. It's true that Ken Bergmann used plastic Halloween bones as
drumsticks. Yes, I did solo on the HarpoMarxophone. Yes, we did conduct a
mock Socialist rally, holy-roller revivalist meeting, and kabuki drama
onstage. And it is indisputable that we stole our moves from Betty Boop.
So sue me. Let it be noted that while we were indulging in all these cheap
thrills, we were simultaneously playing the pants off any klezmer band that
ever lived. [lev, 5/9/96]

I will say the stage "shtick" was totally organic and unselfconscious. When
we were starting out, our "stage antics" (one couldn't call them shows)
were 90% improvised; we were irrepressible, CERTAINLY no less so in
rehearsal than on stage. When we got professional management, they
suggested we crystalize and rehearse, but improv was never absent. The
shows became more polished and the highest and craziest moments moved from
stage more to writing and rehearsing. However, AT ALL TIMES, from the very
beginning, the "show" was intended to illucidate and provide context, and I
think we succeeded.

For a while, almost all klez revival bands tried to put on a "crazy" show,
The Klezmorim certainly established that "tradition" (and acquitted
ourselves quite well, IMHO!). Thank goodness with dominant bands like
Brave Old World, The Klezmatics and the Flying Bulgars, musicianship has
mostly taken over. [djg, 5/15/96]

The origins of THE SHOW and what it all meant

In my last e-mail to you, Ari, I responded kind of flippantly to the issue
of shtick. Everything I told you is true, but of course the truth has many
layers....

During my 12-&-a-half-year tenure (sentence?), we went 'round & 'round over
the issue of whether the stage moves were useful, necessary, or distracting.
Aside from being sheer devilish fun (for us, if for nobody else), they began
as a method of focusing the excess energy we'd been pissing indiscriminately
all over the stage. I mean, like every other folk musician we had to learn
stuff like: don't mumble; don't look at your shoes; tune up backstage, not
onstage; & look at the lead player, so that the audience will. Graduating
to such radical innovations as set lists, intelligible speech, erect
posture, fire, & the wheel seemed natural, & necessary.

The stage moves evolved partially out of sheer logistics. Most of us played
several different instruments, & over the years we had to develop spatial
radar & fluidity of motion onstage simply in order to keep from colliding
with one another & destroying all our horns while getting on & off stage or
switching axes or whatever. It's easier to run than to walk, easier to fly
than to plod.

We moved constantly on stage because we were a 6-piece band playing 9- or
10-piece arrangements. Essentially, everybody played bass lines, rhythm,
counter-rhythm, melody, harmony, & counter-melody. As alto sax player, in a
single tune I might harmonize with the clarinet (instant reed section); play
stings with the trumpet (high brasses); weave counter-rhythms with the
trombone (low brasses); join forces with the drums & tuba (rhythm section);
and then switch to soprano sax & play improvised lead. Each of these
functions would require a different physical alignment onstage -- mostly so
we could hear one another & maintain eye contact so we'd cue together, but
also to help the audience see what they were hearing. (We discovered early
on that most audience members couldn't correlate instruments by sound &
appearance -- so if you wanted them to watch the lead player, you'd have to
put the lead player front & center, doing headstands.) Complicating all
this was mic & monitor placement, hall acoustics & lights, etc., etc., which
differed every night on the road. We pulsed like Betty Boop cartoon
characters for the exact same reason the Fleischer animators invented the
pulse: to synchronize sight & sound.

And then, you know, as it dawned on us that the moves made us interesting --
i.e., correlated with vast improvements in our sex lives -- we got into this
competitive macho thing & became absolutely shameless. So we'd run onstage
& play in midair, & hold high notes 'til we turned blue, & use our horns as
swords & oars & telescopes & whatnot. Let anybody who disdains such cheap
thrills first learn to do them. This stuff is frickin' strenuous & requires
split-second reflexes, not to mention the ineffable mental discipline of Yoda.

Working on the Show had other benefits for us. It was kind of a bonding
experience, as we wrote it & staged it collectively. It reinforced on
another plane what we experienced by collaborating on the musical
arrangements. Klezmer music is ensemble music. The band is the instrument.
We tried to run the band democratically -- without prima donnas. (Instead,
we ended up with six prima donnas... but that's another story.)

The Show gave us a context in which to demonstrate the interrelatedness of
klezmer with Eastern European folk music, early jazz, circus music, Gypsy
music, & early movie soundtracks. If we had just played all that music in
no particular order, it would have seemed arbitrary & random. Hopefully we
presented some sense of the transformation from rural to urban, from folk to
commercial, from Old World to New World. (And yes, I tell you, this required rubber chickens!!!)

The Show enabled us to break out of the moribund folk circuit and into
musical theatre, concert halls & music festivals, arts residencies, national
TV, rock & jazz audiences, Europe, etc. It made us visually appealing. It
was a media hook. It made us not just a band, but an event.

At some level I remained a folk purist & amateur musicologist at heart, &
would have liked the music to succeed strictly on its own merits. But it
would not have happened without the Show. We woulda died on the vine &
never had the chance to spread our klezmer-mushroom-spores across the
topsoil of America & the world....

And let me reiterate: we never compromised the authenticity of the music.
When we played klezmer music, we honestly tried like hell to penetrate the
mindset of the old players, & do what they would have done (or at least,
what they would have done if they'd been us). That was important to us, and
the Show existed independent of that.

And now --let me present the debit side. Concocting & rehearsing the Show
was an incredible drain on our time, energy, & money. (We could rehearse
the music in a living room, but rehearsing the Show required renting a
hall.) And while for several years it was fun & creative & meant that we
always had new & surprising stuff to unleash onstage ... later in the band's
history it became kind of an albatross, something we felt we had to do
whether it was fresh or not.

In my last couple of years with the band -- 1986-'88 -- I began thinking
that the band had enough of a reputation, & the music enough of a niche, for
us to go back to being just players again. Not forgetting what we'd learned
about holding an audience's attention & moving efficiently onstage, but
tossing the shtick. I knew we could do it: we'd had a four-night run at a
very hip club during the Berlin Jazz Festival, where the stage was too tiny
to move & we had to play four hour-long sets per night to hardcore jazz
audiences who came just to hear the improvisations. I mean, we had the
chops. And I began to long for more simplicity; began to think that it
would be more of a challenge to project the same intensity or charisma or
whatever without moving a muscle. And the ensemble musically was the best
it had ever been, with Ben Goldberg (more of a technician than a melodist,
but still pretty damn good) on clarinet and the very loose & delightful
Kenny Wolleson (now playing, I think, with Tom Waits and John Zorn) on
percussion. So maybe we could have just played, and it would have been all
right.

That was a time of great musical growth and much soul-searching. Was the
band the band? Or was it the guys in the band? Was it the idea of the
band? Was it the culture of the band? Like every human enterprise, we'd
outgrown our exuberant adolescence and entered midlife crisis.

My ultimate choice was to change careers & become a writer (&, finally,
multimedia developer). Others made other choices, & I think we all wish
each other well.

None of it had been done before we did it. We had to re-invent everything.
That's the legacy of The Klezmorim (capital T, please).

More later.... [lev, 5/11/96]

I wanted to add a couple of things to the Klezmorim history.... First,
I will verify that Klezmorim already had at least 2 albums out by the
time Kapelye (and us [Klezmer Conservatory Band]) got started. Kapelye & K.C.B. started almost
simultaneously, with our 1st recordings coming out within weeks of
each other. But I remember buying the Klezmorim album with the
R. Crumb cover to check out the music, early on.

In fact, K.C.B.'s early traditional style was to some extent a
response to the Klezmorim's fusion approach to the music. There was a
conscious decision to play the music straight up (as opposed to what
"THOSE GUYS" did), and use our size and focus on Yiddish theatrical
music to differentiate us. With hindsight, I see that they were
simply further down the learning curve than the rest of us. I mean,
look at some of the current work by KCB alumni - the Klezmatics,
Shirim, Don Byron, etc.

Secondly, do either Lev or David remember hanging with the KCB in
Boston, around 1981 or 82? I remember we had a impromptu session at
Die Arbeter Rung branch in Brookline, MA., where we rehearsed at the
time. I definitely remember hanging with David Julian G., Lev. And
sitting in on one of those "what axe do YOU use" thangs between Dave
Harris & Kevin Linscott. It was kinda like an early klezmer summit!
:-) [Charlie Berg, original drummer for KCB, 5/15/96]

I certainly DO remember that, in fact think of it time to time as an
exciting time. This was really the first time we ever got together with
others (at least of our generation, we'd previously jammed with a tired
bemused Dave Tarras) who knew the repetoire and played it, pretty much,
with the same aesthetic! [djg, to Charlie, 8/3/96]

What can I say. When they were good, they were incomparable, and they were mostly very, very good. We'll never hear the train whistling across the plains of Mother Russia again, spewing brass instruments to itinerant Jewish musicians. We'll never again see klezmer breakdancing. But, with any luck, we'll hear more about the band over time, and that will have to serve. ari